Category Archives: Festivals

1. Uluslararası Shakespeare Festivali: The First International Shakespeare Festival in Turkey Reviewed by Anna Carleton Forrester On the homepage for the first international Shakespeare festival in Turkey a banner reads “Prometheus of World Literature Honors Turkey.” But over the course of ten days, the organizers, scholars, students, and contributors of the inaugural festival, hosted at […]

‘Know us by these colours’: Oregon Shakespeare Festival 2016 By Sheila T. Cavanagh, Emory University Oregon Shakespeare Festival (OSF) in Ashland, Oregon sparked considerable controversy last year when they announced their “Play On!” initiative, whereby current playwrights and dramaturgs are being commissioned to “translate” the plays attributed to Shakespeare into twenty first century English. […]

By Janice Valls-RussellCranes are – along with spires and towers – part of the Gdańsk cityscape. The harbour had a man-powered crane back in the Middle Ages, to unload cargo in this busy Hanseatic harbour, long before the steel monsters we associate with the city’s shipyards and their politically charged history. Today, building cranes on […]

Review by Rob Ormsby Celebration, festivity and inclusiveness are the dominant tones in the Chris Abraham-directed A Midsummer Night’s Dream at Stratford Ontario’s Festival Theatre. He signals this festive spirit of community before the show begins by sending many cast members in semi-casual summer dress out to mingle and chat on the theatre’s thrust stage, […]

Review by Rob Ormsby Much has been made of the convention of “Original Practices” (OP) on display in the King John currently playing in the Tom Patterson Theatre at Ontario’s Stratford Festival. These practices appear at the Tom Patterson in the form of a bare wooden stage illuminated by real and simulated candles (augmented by […]

Bitola, Macedonia, 19-25 July 2013 The Bitola Shakespeare Festival is extending the bold intercultural experiment of last year’s Globe-to-Globe Festival in London. As part of the 2012 Cultural Olympiad, Globe-to-Globe launched a planetary Shakespeare project by inviting 37 companies from around the world to perform the playwright’s works in their home languages. The Bitola […]

With the cultural Olympiad well under way in London, attention shifts in August to the Athens of the North and the Edinburgh Festival where, as usual, Shakespeare features in both the official festival and the fringe. The Edinburgh International Festival (EIF) has concert performances of Mendelssohn’s music for A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Camille O’Sullivan’s part-sung, part-spoken The […]

The world of Shakespeare is coming to England during this Olympic year with a whole string of remarkable productions, many of them taking off from a Shakespeare play rather than offering a straightforward, text-based account of it. But that doesn’t mean that there isn’t still a world of Shakespeare elsewhere. From 10 to 15 July […]